Perron-Frobenius theory and frequency convergence for reducible substitutions (Q501439)

The authors prove a general version of the classical Perron-Frobenius convergence property for reducible matrices and apply this result to reducible substitutions thus producing limit frequencies for factors and invariant measures on the associated subshift. The following are the main results of this paper: 1) Let \(M\) be a non-negative integer \((n\times n)\)-matrix which is in power bounded (PB)-Frobenius form. Assume that none of the coordinate vectors is mapped by a positive power of \(M\) to itself or to \(\vec{0}\). Then for any non-negative column vector \(\vec{v}\neq \vec{0}\) there exists a ``limit vector'' \[ \vec{v}_\infty =\lim_{t\to\infty}\frac{1}{\| M^t \vec{v}\|}M^t\vec{v}\neq \vec{0}, \] and \(\vec{v}_\infty\) is an eigenvector of \(M\). 2) Let \(\xi\) be an expanding substitution on a finite alphabet \(A\). Then there exists a positive power \(\zeta =\xi^s\) such that for any non-empty word \(w\in A^*\) and any letter \(a_i\in A\) the limit frequency \[ \lim_{t\to\infty}\frac{| \zeta^t(a_i)|_w}{| \zeta^t(a_i)|} \] exists.